What Will Happen?

So I know I only lived in New York until I was 3, but I still go up to the North all of the time and my family lives there, so I’ve heard my share of bad snow stories. Atlanta’s 2 inches don’t compare.

I understand that the city just isn’t prepared for it, and the ice freezing the roads is the bigger problem, but this has happened every year for the past several years where a little snow shuts down the city. You would think we would have learned. Apparently not though since everyone is already freaking out about what may or may not happen tonight/tomorrow with the weather.

Now while I think Atlanta over reacts a little, I still don’t particularly want to go to school in freezing weather. I wouldn’t mind an extra day at home. I kind of love those days when everyone is forced to stay at the house which is one of the reasons I love going to the North for winter time.

What I really don’t like is when we are given busy work because we are missing school. As of now I still have school tomorrow, but it is a delayed start. However, last year when we had a week off we were given a bunch of work to do while we weren’t at school. I don’t mind work, but I do mind meaningless busy work which was a good portion of what we were given. Teachers were told they had to give us work so we were getting assignments from teachers that they typically never would have given us, but they had to come up with some work for us to do.

Then we had google hangouts with some teachers, and yet there were several students having problems because they had teachers giving them at the same time. Some teachers even gave them early in the morning still so we didn’t really get to sleep in while not going to school.

My friends and I joke (but kind of seriously) that the only thing we remember learning over the snow week that was actually useful was learning how to use google hangouts. (Which we then started to use a lot after the snow week.)

I wish we could have been given more meaningful work, or at least less work so we could have enjoyed our time away from school. I hated that week because it was cold, still had to wake up early, had a ton of work I didn’t enjoy or find meaningful, and didn’t get to play in the snow at all.

I’d like to think we as a school have grown since then and wouldn’t do that again (that way at least), but thinking of the possibilities of what could happen when it snows in Atlanta makes me recall these annoying times and makes me not particularly want to miss school.

While most people today keep getting mad at me for saying this: missing tomorrow entirely would really mess stuff up for Thursday (due to no school Wednesday for conferences), so I’m hesitant to say I don’t want school tomorrow. There are really only 3 reasons I want to go to school: 2nd, 7th, and theater.

Our show Welcome to Nightvale opens in a week, and we need all of the rehearsal time we can get, so missing a day the week before is a huge problem.

For 7th (ID) we are suppose to be doing our practice pitch internal Thursday, and since we don’t have school Wednesday for conferences, we really need as much time as we can get to finish the physical prototype and everything else for the pitch.

For 2nd there is a double reason:
1. Mathematical battles start this week and I’m really looking forward to them, and missing a day of math this week would mean that the battles wouldn’t really work; after the amount of times I’ve suggested this idea (I originally played at Nerd Camp) I don’t want them to not work the one time it finally is happened.

2. While I can’t go to band, the rest of the high school band would really benefit from having more practice time before the concert Thursday, so I want them to be able to have their 2nd period.

Who knows what will happen this time around with the weather? I just hope everyone stays safe; the rest will work itself out eventually.

Ok, disclaimer time from the day after:
I reread post a few days later occasionally, and I realized this one sounded a little more “ranty” then I meant it to be.

I get why we did the work that we did last year during the storm. It was a chaotic time and we had to make quick decisions and didn’t want to get too behind on school work. I didn’t particularly enjoy our first solution, but hey “fail-up”. What I didn’t focus on as much as I was originally trying to was the fact that a lot has happened in one year. When I said “I’d like to think we as a school have grown since then”, I meant that knowing MVPS, I know that we learn from what does and doesn’t work and improve on it for the future. I know I’m not the only one that was a little frustrated during that week last, and teachers were too, and I guess all of the chaos people kept having on social media last night was making me a little annoyed. But when I think about it, it wasn’t like teachers had any time to prepare what they were going to give us to do really. I mean the storm came, we reacted. Cause and effect.

I actually was rather pleased with just having a late start this time because it meant I still got that little “break” and it gave room in case there was ice, but I was also able to be at school for those things that really had to be done today, and now we won’t be seriously behind in anything (hopefully, we did take out two classes today)!

In fact today was really fun! Mathematical battles started and we got to work on some challenging proofs. The coVenture team made awesome progress on the prototype and the room design is just about completely modeled physically!!!! Drama made great strides on the production. And I helped with an interview for new ID applicants and they all seemed pretty great! So I was glad we had school today after all. 🙂